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Xonar EEPROM Failure

Sometimes, Xonar PCI/PCI-E cards randomly fail to be recognized.

The driver refused to load or to install, and in Device Manager, the card is shown as an unknown sound card or as "C-Media Oxygen audio device".
Putting the card into another slot or another computer does not help.

This happens when the EEPROM on the card gets overwritten.
(This EEPROM stores the PCI subsystem vendor and product IDs;
when it gets overwritten, the main chip cannot read the subsystem IDs
and uses a default ID (13F6:8788) which is not recognized by the Xonar driver.)

To reliably detect whether the EEPROM was overwritten,
go into Device Manager, show the properties page of the device,
go to the "Details" tab, and select the property "Hardware IDs",
and look at the values after "SUBSYS_":

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_82691043

OK (Xonar D2)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_82751043

OK (Xonar DX)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_82B71043

OK (Xonar D2X)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_83141043

OK (Xonar HDAV1.3)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_83271043

OK (Xonar DX)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_834F1043

OK (Xonar D1)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_835C1043

OK (Xonar Essence STX)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_835D1043

OK (Xonar Essence ST)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_835E1043

OK (Xonar HDAV1.3 Slim)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_838E1043

OK (Xonar DS)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_84281043

OK (Xonar Xense)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_84671043

OK (Xonar DG)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_85211043

OK (Xonar DGX)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_85221043

OK (Xonar DSX)

PCI\VEN_13F6&DEV_8788&SUBSYS_878813F6

overwritten EEPROM

Causes

The exact cause is unknown.
It seems that the problem occurs only with certain computers or motherboards,
and after booting from a CD (i.e., (re)installation of an operating system, or using a live CD).

Restoring the EEPROM

I have written a tool that can restore the original contents of the EEPROM.
It needs direct access to the hardware, therefore, it can not be run inside Windows.

In DOS

If you have a working DOS, you can use this method. (This tool is run in the same way as Asus' xee01.bat.)